Ichiko Aoba – Luminescent Creatures
On her latest album, Luminescent Creatures, Ichiko Aoba's compositions move incrementally, like the limbs of coral on the seabed, flourishing with cultivation and care
In Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach novels, characters navigate an unchartered ecosystem that assimilates, regurgitates and realigns personal geographies. Like Vandermeer’s series, Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures contains a lighthouse, the coordinates of which – 24° 03' 27.0" N, 123° 47' 7.5" E – provide the name for a short rendition of a folk tune belonging to the people of Japan’s southernmost point, Hateruma island. Through this – also akin to Vandermeer’s books – Aoba traverses the idea that stories, traditions and music can be absorbed and carried through environmental and biological connections over time via the land and nature.
Aoba’s work is steeped in the emotions and form of what we consider cinematic – indeed, her last record Windswept Adan was conceptualised as the score to an imagined film. Luminescent Creatures is an extension of, if not a direct sequel to, that film. But Aoba’s music strays far from what we consider to be cinematic music, which can often be sweeping and grandiose. These songs can be small, even womblike, but no less detailed or ambitious for it. On tower and aurora, Aoba’s playing paints pastoral watercolours. Compositions move incrementally, like the limbs of coral on the seabed, songs flourishing with cultivation and care.
Listen to: tower, FLAG, 惑星の泪 (Wakusei no Namida)